Rewarding data sharing through data citation: from policy to practice

Abstract and slides from talk presented at Japan Open Science Summit in Tokyo on 18 June 2018:
Researchers need incentives to share research data openly. Researchers also need to be credited for data sharing. Enabling and measuring data citation, and making data citations count in research impact assessment, can provide incentives to share data. While many researchers share data in some way, only about a quarter of researchers share data in a repository that enables data to be formally cited. Data citation is supported by many journals and publishers’ policies, but is practiced, consistently, by a far smaller proportion of researchers. For data citation – where references to datasets are equivalent to references to research papers – to increase substantially, change needs to be enabled in three ways. Firstly, through consistent journal polices; secondly, with consistent editorial and peer review practices; and thirdly, with publishing technology to capture and share data citations in a meaningful and machine readable way. Data citation in practice will be demonstrated, using the peer-reviewed data journal Scientific Data as an exemplar, as well examples from more traditional journals. An initiative in the publishing industry that intends to increase the practice of data citation will also be discussed, along with a Research Data Alliance (RDA) project to standardise the data sharing and citation policies of all journals and publishers.

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz is Publisher, Open Research at Public Library of Science (PLOS), where he leads the conceptualisation and development of new products and services that add value to the PLOS portfolio by supporting and enabling open science.
Iain was previously Head of Data Publishing at Springer Nature where he developed and implemented research data policies and services, and was publisher of Nature Research Group’s Scientific Data journal. He has also been Outreach Director at Faculty of 1000 (F1000), and spent seven years at the first commercial open access publisher BioMed Central (BMC) in a variety of editorial, publishing and product/policy development roles.
Iain is part of several research/publishing community projects related to data sharing and reproducible research. He founded and is co-chair of an Interest Group in the Research Data Alliance (RDA) that is setting standards for journal research data policy globally, and founder of the annual early-career researcher conference, Better Science through Better Data. He has published numerous papers related to data sharing, open access, and the role of publishers in reproducible research - one of which has been cited nearly 200 times.

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